Abstract:Algorithmic Trading (AT) is a financial sector that trades financial instruments, such as stocks, with algorithms and no human interaction. This allows the largest prop-trading firms in the world to conduct thousands of trades per second. In practice, the vast majority of strategies are implemented using mathematical formulas based on a variety of stock metrics, such as closing price or volume. However, the effectiveness of these algorithms aren't publicly available due to the necessity of secrecy of implementation details. Part of the thesis aims to uncover and examine the effectiveness of existing metrics-based strategies. We find both Pairs Trading and a combined RSI and MACD momentum algorithm to be incredibly effective.

Moving beyond traditional AT strategies, this thesis further aims to investigate using news- or media-content-based strategies. By using Twitter data and Natural Language Processing (NLP), we create a unique trading strategy based on Twitter sentiment of publicly traded companies tweets using a bevy of machine learning algorithms and a deep learning algorithm. We use models which have basic, extended, and stacked features. We find the basic model to be very ineffective while the extended model beats the baseline measure for 87.5% of stocks tested generating profits of up to 629%. Even though the stacked model only beats the baseline for 62.5% of stocks tested, it proves to be very effective for certain stocks while the deep learning model is far more risk averse than any of the other models explored.

Computer networks have traditionally relied on standard, distributed path computation algorithms to determine how data flows the network. This restricts a network's ability to optimize performance, quickly recover from failures, and achieve many other important objectives. To address these limitations, software-defined networking (SDN) pushes the data forwarding decisions to a centralized, customizable network controller that can exert fine-grained control over network paths. Big Switch develops SDN-based solutions that meet the complex needs of cloud computing and provide increased visibility into a network. This talk will focus on the motivation and basic principles of SDN, as well as the specific ways in which Big Switch is leveraging SDN to address some of the challenges faced by today's computer networks.

Abstract: What does it mean to write American history from the user up? When I was researching A People’s History of Computing in the United States, stories of students and teachers, principals and professors, touch screens and video games – in New Hampshire, Minnesota, and Illinois – jumped off the pages of newsletters, grant reports, and other archival documents. Those are not the people or places that typically come to mind when we think about America’s digital origin stories. This talk focuses on the users of 1960s and 1970s academic computing networks to develop a history of the digital age that emphasizes creativity, collaboration, and community. These students and educators built, accessed, and participated in cooperative digital networks, developing now-quotidian practices of personal computing and social media. In the process, they became what I call “computing citizens.”

Bio: Dr. Joy Lisi Rankin is a feminist, anti-racist historian, and a Contributing Editor for Lady Science. She is also a consultant for the documentaries The Birth of BASIC and The Queen of Code and for the television show Girls Code. Rankin was an Exchange Scholar at MIT while earning her doctorate in History from Yale University, as well as a Visiting Scholar at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Prior to entering the academy, she had a successful career launching educational programs for students of all ages, which took her around the country. Her website is joyrankin.com.

Sogeti is a leading provider of technology and engineering services for clients such as Dell, BMW, Starbucks, and UnderArmour. Career Services is proud to bring one of Sogeti’s national solution architects to walk students through real case studies of how Sogeti works with AWS and their clients to increase efficiencies in their processes, or to introduce cloud technology to their business. Students are welcome to also inquire about his work to become a Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist, Certified Solution Developer, and Certified Professional, as well as a Certified Internet Webmaster. Sogeti is currently accepting applications for their entry-level tech and project manager non-technical roles. Lunch provided.

Abstract: Thousands of people rely on the Colgate wireless (and wired) network on a daily basis to communicate, study, socialize, and more. Using the network is as simple as connecting to "eduroam," but maintaining and upgrading the network is quite complex. In particular, hundreds of network switches must be properly configured to satisfy a complex set of network requirements, for example: allowing only certain computers to access servers containing confidential records. In this talk, I'll discuss why it is difficult to enumerate a network's requirements, and present Nopticon: a system that provides insights into a network's requirements by observing its behavior under different failure scenarios.

Students involved in TIA projects will share their CS-related experiences.

Dunne Goodwin is a full service digital agency providing next generation digital marketing solutions to drive business growth. Sheila Dunne '20 will speak about how they help provide website development and reporting/analytics as well as full service social media marketing strategies.

Good Worker 360 is an online scheduling and employee development tool for restaurants that is designed to help managers create the most effective team and schedule possible. James Nash '21 will speak about how this venture has navigated the process of hiring developers and opportunities for CS majors to work with TIA ventures.

Edge is a private aviation concierge service providing optimal private air charter solutions to individuals and businesses relative to their specific needs. Jack Ablon '21 will speak to the process of setting up the technical needs for Edge, including website, database solutions, etc.

Come learn about the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing. Past student attendees will share their experiences and information will be provided about internal and external student scholarships for attending the conference.

Come eat a cupcake and crack a coding challenge! You don't need coding experience! FIRST PLACE PRIZE IS A DRONE. Don't miss this opportunity for some wholesome computer science bonding!RSVP: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfYWd8Nag3H2Ye60U61Vrs9SuZ2SspRhzKVBGiFiLkBY4yEWA/viewform?usp=pp_url

Abstract: Email is inherently insecure. The official document which governs the SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) mentions that in clear words. Anyone can spoof emails and naive users can easily be tricked. In only three years, revenue losses for American companies due to email-based attacks rose to $1.6 billion. I will discuss some security techniques which can be used to reduce these attacks and, in some cases, prevent them completely. We will talk about how to limit the insecurity and increase the trust in Emails. I consider myself by no means to be an expert in email security but I hope I will be able to share some interesting email-based attack vectors which you might not be aware of! The content of this talk was a result of independent research I did after being affected by privacy issues.

Abstract:This talk covers two empirical studies that disentangle how Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPIs) construct and express their identity in online communities within Reddit. The first study examines how users engage in an online community through a deliberation lens to understand the extent to which Reddit supports identity work as a deliberative process. Through a content analysis of Reddit comments collected during the 2016 US Presidential Election, I discuss how the expression of identity, and thereby solidarity, in a politicized online setting may lead to a social movement. The second study uncovers how moderators on Reddit shape the norms of their subreddit through the analytic lens of emotional labor. I conduct interviews with 21 moderators who facilitate identity work discourse in AAPI subreddits, present a thematic analysis of their moderation practices, and offer recommendations for improving moderation in online communities centered around identity work and discuss implications of emotional labor in the design of Reddit and similar platforms. Woven together, this scholarship aims to inform how other marginalized or understudied AAPI subgroups may come together on online platforms to collaboratively make sense of their intersectional identities.

Bio:Bryan Dosono is a PhD Candidate in Information Science and Technology. A doctoral researcher for the Syracuse University School of Information Studies, Bryan Dosono's scholarship in human-computer interaction and computer-supported cooperative work identifies impactful design opportunities that improve the quality of life for marginalized citizens. He is a recipient of the Google Policy Fellowship, the Ronald E. McNair Graduate Fellowship, and the iSchool Inclusion Institute Teaching Fellowship. He holds a Bachelor of Science degree with honors in Informatics from the University of Washington. Learn more at http://www.bdosono.com.

Learn to code a brick breaker game using processing! This fun workshop is an introduction to processing. Coding experience is helpful, but not required. Led by Erika Fox '21. Featuring Halloween themed treats! RSVP at: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdSitNDQTkhfgDsdd7FDtIJwKswgb6S2L8C2uBSvK58qbXrHw/viewform?usp=sf_link

Have you ever wondered how Netflix recommends shows you may be interested in, or how Google seems to know what you're looking for before you even finish typing your sentence? Come learn about what machine learning is and how it's taking over the tech world with Colgate alumni Ben Bernstein '10, Machine Learning Engineer at Roam Analytics. Catering by Oliveri's! If you are interested in this event, please RSVP at: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfQrQ-LvIJvlvEvSFg4qKnRPHEVXtLOhpESxA2Vm4CQsZCcUQ/viewform?usp=sf_link

Join Josh Rosen '96 for a discussion on "Storytelling and Tech: What I've Learned So Far." Free lunch will be provided. Co-sponsored by Colgate Career Services and the Department of Computer Science.Computer Science Department Research Lounge, 12–1 p.m.

Smart devices have become an integral part of our lives and they continuously collect data about us with, and sometimes without, our knowledge. My research focuses on usable security and privacy of smart devices, and the use of mobile devices, specifically in the health domain as well as in homes, given the sensitive nature of the data collected. First, I will talk about my work involving privacy-preserving sharing of health information between smartphone users who were proximate to each other in location and time. Next, I will talk about some of my initial findings from a study regarding parents’ concerns about their kids' use of smart devices. I will also discuss two studies that I am currently working on — one focuses on understanding why children interact with smart assistants and the other explores what users want to learn about their smartphone app usage. Finally, I will end the talk with a brief demo of a smartphone app developed by a Skidmore student that uses augmented reality for exposure therapy to treat spider anxiety.

Bio: Aarathi Prasad is an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science department at Skidmore College. She received her PhD and M.S in Computer Science from Dartmouth College. Her research interests include usable security and privacy, mobile health, smart devices and wireless networks and she manages the Smart Devices Lab at Skidmore College.

A panel of recent alums and faculty will discuss their graduate school experiences:- Ahsan Mahmood '18, currently a graduate student in Computer Science at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill- Soo Bin Kwon '16, currently a graduate student in Bioinformatics at the University of California, Los Angeles- Prof. Elodie Fourquet, attended the University of Waterloo- Prof. Sandra Jackson, attended Cornell University

We will be sharing a lot of information about WiCS and our goals for this semester! This is a great opportunity to meet people and to see what WiCS is about! Everyone is welcome so make sure to bring any of your friends that are interested.

Abstract: In todays environment all companies need to structure their product and codebase to run on multiple interconnected machines at the same time. Much in the same way in which design patterns allowed companies to grow large codebases early on by providing common solutions that were reused for scalability, there is a new set of emerging design patterns that allows engineers to write easily extendable and durable distributed code. This talk will cover some of the new emerging distributed trends.

Bio: Marius graduated Colgate class of 2014. He worked at Facebook (2 internships), Coursera and now Google. At Google, Marius worked on Cloud Infrastructure for a year and a half and now is working in Google Ads, bringing to our users their beloved Youtube ads. Marius is an engineer. He works on creating new types of ads; that implies a lot of feature work, across multiple stacks, pipelines, frontend, databases, stat aggregation, etc.

Want to learn more about what it’s like to be a Software Development Engineer at Amazon? Come join Colgate alumni Karen Kelley ’13 and Anindya Guha ’15 and hear about their journeys through the tech industry. Catering from RIG! If you are planning on attending this event, please fill out this Google Form: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1QMKSro24D_eGd714la1nzsntdL1VRwA64cNBZBWG0NY/edit

Several students will share their experiences finding and participating in a summer internship:- Ryan Burczak '21 interned at General Electric Global Research and the Royal College of Surgeons Ireland- Liam Emmart '19 interned at IronNet Cybersecurity- Lauren Henske '20 interned at Apple- Cristian Saguil '19 interned at Driectly through a True Entrepreneurs Corps fellowship- Ilias Stitou '19 interned at Barclays- Alex Thomas '19 interned at Epic Systems

At this event, we will be discussing who we are, what we do, upcoming events, and more. Plus, FREE SLICES! If you plan on attending this event, please fill out the Google Form at: https://goo.gl/forms/LsguAOT1sjs866Jz1.

Colgate alumna Christine Swanson, Class of '06, will be coming to campus to give a tech talk on Software Development. This is a great opportunity to network with a Colgate graduate, as well as learn more about software in the workplace. This event will be catered! Please RSVP at: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfb_mtTDMtgXybeEk8VbwQxRjIwVUJuhEO5L8BlikryxqUZXA/viewform?usp=sf_link

The <Colgate Coders> are hosting a Cookies & Coding night! Come hang out for some friendly competition and cookies from Insomnia Cookies! Participants will work in teams to solve a given coding problem. There is no programming experience required, as the challenges will be broken up into three groups ranging from novice to intermediate. Those with less experience with coding can use pseudo-code, whereas the others can use the language they are most comfortable with. The team from each category that finishes first will win prizes! If you plan on attending, please RSVP at: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSePjjq7lkWJArsD1nhx3I6uscBaTD5Pl4_LVKwK5c6807z8sg/viewform?usp=sf_link.

Abstract: P4 is a new language for programming network data planes. The language provides domain-specific constructs for describing the input-output formats and functionality of packet-processing pipelines. Unfortunately P4 programs can go wrong in a variety of interesting and frustrating ways including reading uninitialized data, generating malformed packets, and failing to handle exceptions. In this talk, I will present the design and implementation of p4v, a tool for verifying P4 programs. The tool is based on classic software verification techniques (due to Hoare, Dijkstra, Flanagan, Leino, etc.), but adds several important innovations: a novel mechanism for incorporating control-plane assumptions and domain-specific optimizations, both of which are needed to scale up to large programs. I will discuss our experiences applying p4v to a variety of real-world programs including switch.p4, a large program that implements the functionality of a conventional switch.

p4v is joint work with colleagues from Barefoot, Lugano, and Yale.

Bio: Nate Foster is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Cornell University and a Principal Research Engineer at Barefoot Networks. The goal of his research is to develop languages and tools that make it easy for programmers to build secure and reliable systems. He currently serves as chair of the P4 Language Consortium steering committee and as a member of the ACM SIGCOMM Symposium on SDN Research (SOSR) steering committee. He received a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Pennsylvania, an MPhil in History and Philosophy of Science from Cambridge University, and a BA in Computer Science from Williams College. His awards include an NSF CAREER award and a Sloan Fellowship.

Abstract: Accenture is a leading global professional services company, providing a broad range of services and solutions in strategy, consulting, digital, technology and operations. This workshop will focus on what Cyber Security is and how it is used in the tech field. To RSVP to this workshop, you must fill out our google form [https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfXuW_RPfB_iIfnz5LGuxbSS-GWJ3NCKFqUVW5Z27DI6HNoMw/viewform?usp=sf_link] and Accenture’s form [https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSesXUmecL7RNOnfCnTnFmm0Ab8yUe8GsUBQKcTsB-rvUSE1-A/viewform].

Abstract: This talk will focus on the technical and business implications of AI, and how Microsoft is democratizing AI by offering the capabilities in its cloud and end user computing services. We are very excited to have Mr. Portilla at Colgate! To RSVP to this event, please fill out this Google form: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScxqFLBVUNu9ZuUg8AZS3pX3wUcbWOrVcTYcOSimVwYM6SNXA/viewform.

Git is a version control system that stores files and facilitates group work. It is used by major tech companies such as Facebook, Twitter, and eBay. In addition, the Colgate comp sci department uses Git.

In order to participate, you MUST install Git (https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Getting-Started-Installing-Git) and create a GitHub account (https://github.com/) BEFORE the workshop.

We hope you’ll stop by and learn this valuable skill! To sign up for this workshop, please complete the following survey: https://goo.gl/forms/sKY6jvZ3dyN8LAWn1

Abstract: Spending time together and enjoying everyday activities helps to support interpersonal relationships, which have many positive benefits for individuals. However, many of these activities are difficult, if not impossible, to participate in when the relationship is long-distance. This work aims to address that problem with one such activity: watching videos together (or video co-watching). In this extended abstract we describe the user-centered design process we used to design our video co-watching web app. Specifically, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 10 individuals who watch videos with others to understand their current video watching activities. We analyzed those findings using affinity diagramming to identify user requirements and features. After sketching multiple wireframes and getting feedback, we developed an interactive prototype and are currently refining our code to make a live version.

At its core, communication comprises a relationship between speaker and audience. Developing that relationship is key to communication success. Especially for women in science, the way things are said and done matters as much as the substance. How best to present the hard substance of scientific ideas with the verbal and nonverbal “soft skills” needed to communicate effectively about them? During this presentation, the explicit and implicit messages inherent in different communication styles are exposed, revealing how they promote - or degrade - interpersonal engagement, rapport, and influence.

Women in Computer Science will be discussing what they do as a club as well as exciting events that are coming up this semester. WiCS will also discuss the difficulties of women in the work force and share some interesting trends that highlight the past, present, and future of women in the CS field.

Can you hack it? Join us to learn more about this national leader in cyber technology and information security in Colgate's backyard. AIS' clients range across industry, business, and the government. Get the inside scoop on what they're looking for in interns. Pizza will be served!

Professor Ramachandran will cover course registration and curriculum info. Professors Strash and Smith will be on hand to answer questions about their courses, as will other faculty should you have registration/advising questions.

Shion Guha from the Department of Mathematics, Statistics and Computer Science at Marquette University, will speak. We face policies and consequences of algorithmic decisions in most facets of daily life. Largely, we do not know how these algorithms are designed, applied and how policies are created based on them. In this talk, Shion will present a mixed methods study of the practices, policies and perceptions of algorithmic policing in the city of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Using publicly available data over a 12 year period (2005-2016), he will show how common algorithmic practices by city crime analysts diverge from statistical best practices and investigate this differential by visualizing potential demographic biases and conducting semi-structured interviews of 11 city stakeholders. Results suggest that algorithmic opacity, funding and pol- icy apathy contribute towards this discrepancy which in turn affects future policing policies. Further, he provides directions towards understanding ethics, transparency and accountability in the design and implementation of algorithms and outline a research agenda for a more human-centered understanding of algorithmic practices. A reception will follow the talk.

Abstract: Computer network outages and security breaches are often the result of errors in the configurations of network routers. Manually repairing these configurations is daunting because of their inter-twined nature across routers and traffic classes. Inspired by recent work in automatic program repair, we introduce CPR, a system that automatically computes correct, minimal repairs for network configurations. CPR casts configuration repair as a MaxSMT problem whose constraints are based on a digraph-based representation of the configurations' semantics. Using configurations from 96 data center networks, we show that CPR produces repairs in less than a minute for 98% of the networks, and these repairs requiring changing the same or fewer lines of configuration than hand-written repairs in 79% of cases.

Abstract: In a social network, a clique is a group of mutual friends. A clique is maximum if it has the largest cardinality among all cliques in the graph. This past summer, I worked with Prof. Darren Strash on speeding up maximum clique searches on large sparse graphs. While there is no known efficient algorithm to compute a maximum clique, there are numerous real-world applications, including community detection in social networks and molecular docking in computational biology. Our algorithm is a proof of concept which shows that applying advanced graph partitioning techniques to reduce graph size significantly speeds up clique finding in practice.

Getting an internship, full-time job, or admission or graduate school can seem like a daunting task. We'll cover what steps you should take to find and apply for jobs, internships, and graduate programs in tech. We'll also highlight some of the resources career services offers to help with your search.

Abstract: Multiple past studies has shown that motor imagery of the opening and closing of the hand can be effectively categorized with high accuracy using laboratory grade BCI systems. In our study we sought out to determine if a relatively affordable BCI setup can also classify the same sets of motor imagery with acceptable accuracy rates. To accomplish this, we first implemented our own BCI system in Java using an OpenBCI EEG headset as the signal acquisition device and a 3D printed robotic arm as the feedback interface. With our system in place, we ran multiple trials to record separate EEG data associated with the motor imagery of the closing and opening of the right hand. Using the LIBSVM package, we were able to train a set of models based on the pre-recorded trials which we then used to tests against random sample data to determine classification accuracy. By testing subsets of pre-recorded trial data on the model, we received prediction accuracy of over 80%.

Abstract: In this talk, I will discuss my recent research on visibility graph reconstruction: the problem of constructing a polygon that has a given visibility graph. This is a fundamental problem with unknown complexity, although visibility graph recognition (the problem of recognizing if a graph is a visibility graph of some polygon) is known to be in PSPACE.

I show that two classes of uniform step length polygons can be reconstructed efficiently by finding and removing rectangles formed between consecutive convex boundary vertices, called tabs. This technique gives a O(n^2m)-time reconstruction algorithm for orthogonally convex polygons, where n and m are the number of vertices and edges in the visibility graph, respectively. I also show that reconstructing a monotone chain of staircases (called a histogram) is fixed-parameter tractable, when parameterized on the number of tabs, and polynomially solvable in time O(n^2m) under reasonable alignment restrictions.

This is joint work with Nodari Sitchinava; to be presented at the 25th Symposium on Graph Drawing and Network Visualization.

Sharpen your coding and problem solving skills in our mini programming challenge! We'll work in teams to solve a few problems from recent programming competitions. Prof. Strash will also discuss how you can participate in the ACM Programming Contest.

Speakers: Drew Zhong and Carlton YangDrew's Abstract: Engineering a fast branch-and-reduce algorithm for the minimum vertex cover problemI developed three new techniques to improve a state-of-the-art branch-and-reduce algorithm (by Akiba and Iwata, 2016) for computing an exact minimum vertex cover in larger networks such as social networks and web-crawl graphs in exact time. First, I show that we can change the order to apply slow yet critical reduction rules in a more targeted way. Second, I am able to feed the algorithm with a high-quality solution to avoid many branching calls. Third, I store solutions to subproblems to avoid repeated computations. My experiments have successfully improved the running time of this algorithm for many real-life networks, for which the existing algorithms take long time to find a solution.

Carlton's Abstract:GPU Acceleration on Large Computational ModelsStudies in regulatory biological networks often rely on mathematical modeling and computer simulations on various scales and levels of complexity. Various packages are created to provide simulation and analysis on such models, yet currently available packages do not fully meet the requirements of researchers. My research focuses on creating a software that is efficient, easily updatable and user friendly to researchers without substantial programming skills.

Bria Vicenti will be giving an overview of her honor’s thesis titled "Developing a Concussion Tracking Application for the Modern Student-Athlete”. She will give an overview of the user-centered design process which she utilized to design a mobile application for the Colgate Club Sports program in the hope of improving concussion self-reporting behaviors in student athletes.

Abstract: An intro to how biases creep into machine learning, and why we should be cautious. Followed by tech industry insights -- what CS looks like in school vs startups vs big companies, some unintuitive keys to success, thoughts on grad school, and what product management is.

Bio: Gaurav Ragtah is a product manager at Yelp, and has previously led mission-critical projects at Google Nest, Lithium Klout, and LinkedIn SlideShare. He did his undergrad at Colgate (Computer Science '13), and recently finished his Master's at Columbia, focused on Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing. Gaurav loves working on AI side projects, enjoys reading up on sociology and linguistics, speaks four languages natively, and occasionally performs south asian fusion music.

Abstract: We envision a future in which robots mingle with humans in city squares, train stations, malls, or popular meeting spots on college campuses. These robots will perform a variety of tasks such as cleaning, leading guided tours, delivering items or providing help and information. Such robots will need varying degrees of help performing their tasks, and that help could be supplied by anyone in the immediate vicinity of the robot. These robots will need to approach nearby people for help. These people may not be accustomed to interacting with robots and will be unprimed, that is they may not be expecting an approach from a robot, or expect to come into contact with a robot at all. Approaching a person for help involves three main subtasks: selecting who to ask, approaching that person, and initiating the interaction with verbal and non-verbal communicative behaviors. In this talk, the steps to establishing a research program in these areas will be described, and the challenges of working with real robot platforms will be explored.

Bio: Dr. Nick Webb is Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Union College. His research encompasses a range of Natural Language Processing applications, including Information Extraction, Question Answering and Dialogue Systems, as well as Social Robotics, and Computer Science Education. He was the Principal Investigator of the NSF-funded Social Robotics Consortium of the Capital Region, and is co-PI of the Social Robotics Workshop, funded by the National Center for Women and Information Technology (NCWIT) and Google IgniteCS. He is not a roboticist.

Abstract: A look at the case to be made that John Vincent Atanasoff, born in Hamilton, NY in 1903, was indeed the inventor of the digital computer.

Bio: Tom Brackett is a Professor Emeritus of Computer Science at Colgate. He founded Colgate's Computer Science department in 1971 and was the Director of Computing at Colgate from 1970 to 1975. Before founding the CS department, Tom was a professor in the Chemistry departments at Colgate (1963 to 1971) and Rice University (1957 to 1962). Tom, along with his spouse Elizabeth Brackett, have worked extensively to support the education of Burmese refugees. They founded the Brackett Refugee Education Fund in 1997 and were awarded a Doctor of Humane Letters Honoris Causa by Colgate in 2015.

Speaker: Madeline E. SmithAbstract:Computing technologies have become increasingly embedded into modern life. Tools such as smartphones have become so ubiquitous that it is hard for us to imagine life without them. Undoubtedly such technologies have have significant impact on people’s lives, both positive and negative. Smartphones with built-in GPS functionality allow us to navigate through places we are unfamiliar without ever getting lots. People have also blindly followed those same GPS directions off of cliffs and into lakes, leading to severe injuries and even deaths [1,2].

During this tea we will use this and several other examples to discuss questions such as: As computer scientists who work on designing and building these tools and the technologies that make them possible, how can we consider the social impact of our work? How do our own personal values become embedded into our code? What are our ethical and moral responsibilities?

Abstract: Colgate's Through into Action (TIA) program helps budding entrepreneurs turn their ideas into successful ventures. Ryan, founder of Trippie, and Cristian, founder of Pigeon, will speak about their ventures and the technical challenges they're trying to solve.

Finding what you want in the airport doesn't have to be such a hassle anymore. Trippie takes the turbulence out of navigating airports.

Pigeon Ridesharing is a long-distance ride matching service that places college students together in carpools based on their destinations. Currently, we operate at Colgate University, helping students find transportation home for major breaks and holidays.

Abstract: ​​Even after decades of vision research, interaction between user and computer hasn't been perfected. But a wave is simple, but that has difficulties in itself. My research aims to understand the difficulty of this problem and develop an environment to test any hypotheses I develop with my mentor, Elodie Fourquet, such as applying known body proportions to intuitively understand the body. Using the temporal and spatial coherences in mapping body proportions as specified by Vitruvius, we found that if the human body can be found within certain parameters, not only can we track it, but we can predict where the body went when its out of focus and categorize anyone in frame based on how they vary from the Vitruvian body ratio. Our implementation detects extrema from a moving silhouette based on skin color and motion, and gathers relevant information to build a personal model given the silhouettes in frame.

Abstract: Specialized hardware accelerators, including third-party accelerators, can offer system designers high performance and/or low energy. They are increasingly complex and have interesting new abilities, such as sharing a unified memory space with the host system. However, accelerators may contain security vulnerabilities due to design flaws or malicious intent. I will give an overview of some types of threats that may be especially important when considering accelerators. I will then talk about a low-overhead approach to mitigating one particular flaw: incorrect memory accesses to host system memory by the accelerator. We show how accelerators can be forced to respect process memory access permissions as stored in the page table, with a per-accelerator storage overhead of 0.006% the size of physical memory and low (on average, 0.15%) performance overheads.

Bio: Lena Olson received her PhD in Computer Sciences from University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2016. She was advised by Mark Hill. Her dissertation focused on the security and reliability challenges of hardware accelerators, in particular how third-party accelerators can coherently access shared memory while still maintaining safety and security on the host system. Her other research interests included various ways of improving energy efficiency in CPU caches through predicting block reuse behavior. Lena works in Google's Madison office.

Abstract: Our brains receive 11 million bits of information every second, but we can only consciously process 40 bits per second. Thus, the majority of our mental processing is ruled by our unconscious. These unconscious decisions are influenced by our own biases, which can lead us to make decisions that negatively impact our peers, our university, the computer science community, and society.

Aaron will engage students and faculty in exercises that illustrate unconscious bias, present some of the leading research on unconscious bias, and discuss strategies that are used by some of the leading companies in technology to overcome unconscious bias.

Can we mine personal data while protecting privacy? Can a computer put back together a pile of marble fragments? Can we replace network operators with computer programs? 2D or not 3D?

These are just some of the research questions that CS professors will be exploring with students this summer. Come hear about some of the exciting projects you can be involved in as part of Colgate's undergraduate summer research program.

More information about the program and projects is available at: http://www.colgate.edu/summer

Google software engineers (and Colgate alums!) will guide you through a year-by-year walkthrough of how to best prepare yourself to work in the tech industry. We'll be dialing in over Hangouts to share this intel with only those who can make it to the event -- full details are below. We will have food and swag available while they last, too!

RSVP for the event here: http://goo.gl/ECRMj6. If you’re interested in internships or full-time opportunities with us next summer make sure to include a soft copy of your resume in your registration.

Professors Gember-Jacobson and Hay will give an overview of their 400-level courses being offered in Spring 2017, and the department will review its other course offerings. Faculty will be on-hand to answer questions about course registration and for other advising.

Maria Zhang, Vice President of Engineering at Tinder, speaks about mobile app development and the evolving mobile presence of Tinder. This event is in cooperation with Career Services and Institutional Advancement.

Bio: As Vice President of Engineering, Maria Zhang leads development efforts at Tinder, building and scaling the app for its global user base, assembling and guiding a world-class team of engineers and challenging everyone to create software instilled with purpose. Prior to joining Tinder, Maria served as Vice President of Engineering at Yahoo Mobile, garnering the highly coveted Apple Design Award and shipping major product releases, including: Yahoo, Yahoo News Digest, Yahoo Sports and Yahoo Fantasy Sports. Prior to Yahoo, Maria founded Alike, a mobile local recommendation app later acquired by Yahoo. Maria’s previous positions include Principal Software Development Manager at Microsoft, Product Team Lead at Zillow.com, and Senior Software Engineer at NetIQ Corp. Maria received a Masters in Computer Science and a B.A. in Computer Science, Mathematics and Economics from Eastern Michigan University after transferring from Tsinghua University in Beijing. She currently resides in Palo Alto, California.

Abstract: The idea of asynchronous circuits is actually not a new one, but for a long time, synchronous circuit design has been the accepted design method. However, due to current challenges that come along with synchronous design, as well as certain projects that asynchronous circuits are particularly suited for, asynchronous circuits have reemerged as a necessary design consideration. Research has developed two basic schools of thought on how these asynchronous circuits should be implemented. Quasi-delay insensitive (QDI) asynchronous circuits make use of completion trees in order to control data flow. Bundled data (BD) asynchronous circuits exploit known delays to control data flow. Both of these methods have been used in high-profile emerging technologies which are highlighting the benefits of asynchronous circuits and paving the way for increased use of this design method.

Bio: Sandra Jackson received her Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Cornell University in 2014. While at Cornell she was a member of the Asynchronous VLSI and Architecture Lab. More recently, she attended the IEEE conference on Asynchronous Circuits and Systems to present research related to her thesis on Gradual Synchronization. Her research interests currently include asynchronous circuits, synchronization, neuromorphic computing, and genetic algorithms.

Join us for a discussion with Carol Drogus to review different types of opportunities for off-campus study, including the processes to apply to them, and to hear from students who have participated in Colgate study groups and approved programs.

Put your coding and problem solving skills to the test and join us for a mini programming challenge. We'll work in teams to solve a problem from a recent ACM Program Competition. We'll have laptops on hand, or you can use your own, to write and test your solution. There may even be a special treat for teams that successfully solve the problem.

The Consortium for Computing Sciences in Colleges — Northeastern Region conference includes a programming contest and career fair. Students are encouraged to participate; contact Char Jablonski or Vijay Ramachandran for more information. See: http://ccscne.org/conferences/ccscne-2016/

Join us for our end-of-semester party, including a chance to recognize our graduating seniors. Note that the department event will only start at 12:30pm, after the University's award convocation that takes place at 11:30am.

Abstract: Towards the end of the 20th century, digital computing was dominated by the general purpose processor. Economies of scale meant that a well-rounded CPU that could do just about anything was cheaper and more efficient than a processor built for a specific task in many scenarios. However, in today's power-constrained and battery-driven systems, the inefficiencies of traditional CPU architectures are too big to ignore. Workloads like 3D graphics rendering and media streaming take large enough amount of computational power that it is worth adding special hardware specifically for those tasks. Special hardware requires special software to use effectively, so we will spend some time looking at how hardware and software have adapted together in the pursuit of efficiency.

Prof. Ramachandran presents some example programming-challenge problems and leads a discussion about techniques to solve them. These exercises are a great way to review some material from algorithms & data structures.

Tor is a system for anonymous communication that has millions of users around the world. We will start with an overview of this real-world system including both how it works and known attacks on this system. We will then discuss ways in which beliefs about trust might be used to improve Tor’s security. As part of this, we will describe a modular system that allows users to capture such beliefs using probability distributions on sets of network elements that might be observed by an attacker. We will illustrate this system through the study of two novel types of attackers. This is based on joint work with Aaron Johnson, Sarah Cortes, Paul Syverson, and Joan Feigenbaum.

Aaron Jaggard is a researcher in the Formal Methods Section of the Center for High Assurance Computer Systems at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory. He was previously a visiting assistant professor of computer science at Colgate, an assistant research professor at the DIMACS center at Rutgers, and a VIGRE postdoctoral fellow in mathematics at Tulane. His research involves the development and use of models to reason about the trustworthiness and security of systems. This includes work on accountability and identifiability, dynamics of game-theoretic systems, anonymous communication, and formal-methods analysis of protocols.

Sonia Chiasson, Canada Research Chair in Human Oriented Computer Security at Carleton University in Ottawa will give a remote presentation about her research for this department tea.

Abstract: There is a prevailing belief that users are the weakest link the security chain. I will discuss how this perspective is inherently counterproductive to achieving increased cyber security and explore alternatives with a higher chance of improving security. Why do users behave insecurely even though most will readily state that security and privacy are important to them? This talk will cover some of our most recent research exploring reasons why users' actions do not necessarily reflect their desire for security. I will discuss our work using eye-tracking to determine how users make phishing determinations, and how we can persuade users to behave more securely through improving their mental models of passwords and by making adjustments to the system configurations.

Modern applications are inherently concurrent, but concurrent code is quite difficult to write and scale. This talk will focus on what is becoming an increasingly popular solution to writing scalable and data driven code - functional reactive programming.

For an introduction to reactive programming, see https://gist.github.com/staltz/868e7e9bc2a7b8c1f754.

This department tea will feature a remote presentation by Barath Raghavan, a researcher at the International Computer Science Institute (Berkeley, CA).

Abstract: Money drives political campaigns today, and weakens our democracy. Candidates with big donors or deep pockets dominate the political landscape. Some existing campaigns have recognized the value of political volunteers, but rarely are their skills harnessed effectively. We're building technology to tame the chaos of grassroots campaigns, enabling candidates (and issue campaigns) with little money but true democratic support to win elections.

We will be joined by Carol Drogus, Interim Director of Off-Campus Study. Our goals are to assess from students who have already traveled abroad what they enjoyed about their programs and how they chose programs and courses, and to discuss with students thinking about going abroad the process to do so. We'll also discuss some new ideas we have been thinking about that are relevant to computer-science students. This is an opportunity to share experiences and have questions answered.

Lunch will, of course, be served. Hope to see you there!

To all sophomores: remember that the deadline for approved programs is Friday, February 5.

For our department tea on November 17, Cindy Han and Abeneazer Chafamo will talk about the research they did with Prof. Hay this past summer. Lunch will be available.

Title: Differentially Private Machine Learning: An Empirical Evaluation of Differentially Private ClassifiersAbstract: Machine learning is a subfield of artificial intelligence that focuses on recognizing and learning patterns from real data in order to make predictions. For our research project, we were particularly interested in classifiers. A classifier is a machine learning method that uses pattern matching to attempt to assign a label/class to an observation. For example, classifiers can be used to label an email as spam, to predict a patient’s risk level for a particular disease, etc. In certain cases, data that is used to build these classifiers is sensitive (e.g. medical data) and people need a privacy guarantee before they volunteer their data. One of the most prevalent methods of trying to ensure privacy is anonymization or the removal of personal identification information; however, anonymization doesn’t provide sufficient privacy, thus we need a more robust method of privacy. Differential privacy is a proposed alternative to anonymization. It ensures that computations be insensitive to changes in an individual’s record. Differential privacy achieves this by adding noise to the statistical computations. There has been much research in the past on differentially private classifiers; however, there has not yet been a comprehensive study of the existing differentially private classifiers. The goals of the project were to look at the current algorithms in the field and do an empirical comparison and to propose possible improvements to current algorithms.

For our next department tea, we will be joined remotely by Te-Yuan Huang and Laura Pruitt from Netflix.Come for lunch and to learn a bit about how Netflix video streaming works!

Title: A Day in the Life of Netflix Video Streaming

Abstract: Video streaming is a huge and growing fraction of Internet traffic.Netflix alone accounts for over 37% of the peak download traffic inthe United State. This talk will give an introduction on how Netflixvideo streaming works, including how video is distributed over theInternet and how video quality is adapted. This talk will also brieflytouch upon the research questions in video adaptive streaming andprovide an overview on the recent academic and industrial efforts.

For our next department tea, we will be joined (remotely) by Dharmesh Bhatt '13 who currently works for Uber. Dharmesh will talk about the mobile application release process and A/B testing within Uber. Lunch will be available, as usual.

Our department tea on October 27 will feature a guest speaker, Marwan Fayed, from the University of Stirling in the UK. Marwan will talk about his work in adaptive video streaming. As usual, lunch will be available, too.

Speaker: Marwan Fayed, University of Stirling, Scotland, UKTitle: Network-layer Fairness for Adaptive Video StreamingAbstract: Netflix, iPlayer, YouTube, and the like, are now the dominant sources of traffic on the Internet. Recent studies observe that competing adaptive video streams generate flows that lead to instability, under-utilization, and unfairness behind bottleneck links. Additional measurements suggest there may also be a negative impact on users' perceived quality of experience as a consequence. While it may be intuitive to resolve application-generated issues at the application layer, in this presentation I shall demonstrate the merits of a network layer solution. I will present a new network-layer metric that reflects user experience. Experiments using our open-source implementation in the home environment reveals that the network-layer may just be the right place to attack the general problem.

Marwan Fayed received his MA from Boston University and his PhD from the University of Ottawa, in 2003 and 2009 respectively, and in between worked at Microsoft as a member of the Core Reliability Group. He joined the faculty at the University of Stirling, UK in 2009 as under the Scottish Informatics and Computer Science Alliance (SICSA) scheme. He has since been appointed 'Theme Leader' for networking research in Scotland. His current research interests lie in wireless algorithms, as well as general network, transport, and measurement in next generation edge networks. He is a co-founder of HUBS C.I.C., an ISP focussed on rural communities, and serves on committees of IEEE and ACM conferences.

For our department tea on October 20, Lillie Pentecost '16 will talk about the summer research she did with Prof. Stratton. Join us for her research talk and lunch!

Speaker: Lillie Pentecost '16Title: Accelerating Dynamically Typed Languages with a Virtual Function CacheAbstract: Dynamically typed languages are increasingly important to programmers of all levels because they allow for extended class hierarchies with shared interfaces and inheritance. Virtual functions are a key element in implementing these interesting and useful features. However, virtual functions are more costly than static equivalents, so they are often avoided either in code or by aggressive compiler optimizations. This summer, Professor Stratton and I designed, implemented, and did preliminary tests of hardware support for the execution of virtual function calls in the form of a Virtual Function Cache. By providing support to virtual functions at the hardware level, we aim to improve overall performance of dynamically typed languages and other applications of indirect function calls so that programmers can reap the benefits of these features without suffering performance costs.

For our department tea on October 6, we are happy to have Mike Komosinski '11 join us as our speaker. Lunch will be provided.

Title: Coding after ColgateSpeaker: Mike Komosinski ‘11, GoogleDescription:Most of us plan on working as a software developer after graduation. Some of us have had internships to better prepare us for that day. But what is the job actually like, and what does it mean to code as part of a team? Mike Komosinski ‘11, front-end software engineer at Google and previously engineer at Amplify Education, will join us to talk about the abbreviated wisdoms he’s gained in four years on the job. He’ll answer questions like “what do you do in a typical day?”, “what do you wish you knew earlier?”, and “can you get me a job at Google??”. Refreshments, cool swag, and a rant about git will also be provided!

Ethics in computer science relates to how professionals within the discipline should make decisions and conduct themselves. The main professional society within computer science, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), has a Code of Ethics that members are expected to abide by, which includes principles such as avoiding harm to others and respecting the privacy of others (see https://www.acm.org/about/code-of-ethics for the full list). These principles, while useful, may not provide obvious answers when confronted with questions such as how much testing is enough when life-critical software is concerned, or the obligations of software developers concerning security and/or privacy breaches, or what ethical decisions should be encoded in software itself.

Join us for our next tea in which we'll have a discussion on ethics in the computing profession. Lunch will be provided.

Join us for our department tea on September 22 in students Duy Tran and Michael Chavinda will talk about their research with Prof. Elodie Fourquet. Lunch will be provided.

Talk abstract:Graphics packages that support non-­trivial drawing usually require an overwhelming amount of mathematical and computational knowledge to use. Computer science departments, as a result, tend not to offer graphics­-intensive courses until advanced undergraduate classes. Our project is to create a powerful but simple graphics library in Python and Java that is tailored for novice programmers.

Our next department tea will feature a discussion with computer science department alums who currently work for Epic, a company based in Madison, Wisconsin, that develops software for the healthcare industry. We will talk with alums about their experiences working at Epic, including technical and work-life aspects. Lunch will be provided, too.

Computer Science will participate in the 9th annual Ho Symposium on summer student research sponsored by the Division of Natural Sciences and Mathematics. Michael Chavinda, one of the student researchers working on a distinction-winning project mentored by Prof. Fourquet, will briefly present his research.

Join us for our next department tea! We will have two speakers, Farah Fouladi '15 and Sam Daulton '15. Each will speak about their final project from Professor Ay's course on Modeling of Biological Systems.

Lunch will be served following the talks.

Title: Predicting Cancer using Mutual Information-based Gene Association NetworksSpeaker: Sam Daulton '15Abstract: Machine-learning algorithms can be used on gene expression data as an alternative to traditional clinical methods for diagnosing cancer and determining a patient’s prognosis. A standardized, accurate approach to classifying and diagnosing colon cancer does not exist. Little is known about molecular alterations associated with the heterogeneity of the disease, and no molecular marker has been validated for clinical practice as a diagnostic or prognostic parameter. We propose a novel supervised classification algorithm, the NBC-A method, for predicting cancer from gene expression data with greater accuracy and for identifying genetic biomarkers. NBC-A improves the NBC method developed by Ay et al. in 2014 by constructing gene association networks using mutual information as the statistical metric instead of Pearson correlation. We expect NBC-A to produce transcriptional networks that are more indicative of the underlying biological pathways of colorectal cancer, leading to discovery of new biomarkers. NBC-A yields higher classification accuracies than many traditional classifiers including Support Vector Machine (SVM), k-Nearest Neighbors (kNN), and Naïve Bayes (NB) on the tested colon cancer dataset. In addition, NBC-A outperforms all other methods tested (NBC, SVM, kNN, NB, and Random Forest (RF)) on a lung cancer dataset.

Over the past few years Java has added a number of new tools for concurrent and parallel programming. With multi-core chips in most computers today, these tools are easy to use. In this talk I will describe some of these new tools and demonstrate their use.

Join us for our next department tea! Our speaker will be Jessica Cundiff, who studies gender bias and has looked specifically at such biases in the field of computer science. This should be an informative talk!

Lunch will be served following the talk.

Title: Addressing the gender gap in computer science: Why are women underrepresented and what can we do about it?Speaker: Jessica Cundiff, Visiting Assistant Professor of Pyschology

Women continue to be underrepresented in computer science, with only 22% of bachelor’s degrees awarded to women over the last 10 years. Drawing from recent work in social psychology, this talk examines the factors that contribute to women’s underrepresentation in computer science. The talk will also present potential strategies for increasing gender diversity and inclusion, focusing on implementing change at both the structural level and interpersonal level within academic departments. Although the talk focuses on closing the gender gap, the strategies presented have potential for increasing interest and retention in computer science more broadly.

Join us for our next department tea! Our speaker will be Tristan Lawrence, a Site Reliability Engineer at Google. Tristan graduated from Colgate in 1997 with a dual major in Asian Studies and Physical Science. After graduation, he began working in the IT industry and has been working at Google since 2005.

Lunch will be served following the talk.

Title: A Cluster of SpidersSpeaker: Tristan Lawrence '97, Google

The first step in indexing the Internet is to download it. But how do you replicate such a widely distributed, dynamic entity? Tristan Lawrence '97, a Site Reliability Engineer from Google, will discuss the challenges of implementing a web crawl at Google scale and explore the lessons Google engineers have learned while operating some of the world's most complex and data-intensive online services.

Join us for our next department tea! Our speaker will be Jason Keith, Assistant Professor of Chemistry at Colgate. He will be talking about his research which brings together ideas and techniques from three sciences: Chemistry, Physics, and Computer Science.

With the rise in computational power of the last quarter century and the development of new faster quantum chemical techniques such as density functional theory computation has become a requisite part of modern chemistry research. This includes examination of chemical structures, various types of spectroscopy including vibrational and electronic as well as the understanding of chemical reaction mechanisms and the resulting kinetics. His talk will focus on the basic machinery of quantum based techniques as well as the presentation of some of his current results.

Join us for our department tea on Feb. 10. This week we will have a conversation around "side projects." By this, we mean extracurricular projects that involve coding that students do out of interest or out of a desire to develop skills, etc. that will help them on the job market.

Several students have agreed to give very brief presentations about their side projects.

Please come to hear about their work, to share your own projects, and/or to learn how you might start a project on your own. For students looking to form a team to work on a bigger project, this is an opportunity to find other students who are looking for the same. The faculty will also chime in with some advice.

Join us for out department tea on Feb. 3. This summer there will be several opporunities for students to stay on campus and do research with the COSC faculty. Come to this tea to hear brief presentations by Professors Fourquet, Stratton, Sommers, and Hay. Each will describe the projects they will be working on and the potential opportunities for student involvement. Take a break and join us for lunch and discussion!

The presentations will be in the research lounge followed by lunch at the other end of the hall.

Welcome back! Please join the COSC department faculty for our next department tea, January 27, at 11:20. Our tea will be a friendly and casual discussion over lunch this week. Come and join us for lunch and discussion.

Please join the COSC department faculty for our next department tea, December 2, at 11:20. Our tea will be a friendly and casual discussion over lunch this week. Take a break and join us for lunch and discussion!

Join Michael Sciola and James Reed for an open discussion of career resources and student interests.

Michael Sciola, AVP and director of career services, is a 20+ year veteran in guiding students of all backgrounds and interests to a successful career launch. James Reed joins CCS this fall from RPI to advise students interested in STEM careers.

Join us for our department tea on November 11. Prof. Stratton will be our speaker, and lunch will be provided following his talk.

Historically, compilers were built to solve the two biggest problems in the transition to high-level languages: accurately interpreting high-level language syntax and efficiently generating a sequence of machine instructions that performed the proscribed computation. Today, these are largely solved problems, but the demands of programmers and systems alike create new challenges and opportunities for code analysis and transformation technology. This talk will be an overview of some of the new problems compilers are trying to solve, including some of my current work on compilers for education and compilers for parallel and heterogeneous systems.

Please join us for our next department tea, November 4, at 11:20. Our tea will be a friendly and casual discussion, including discussion of 400-level courses offered in Spring '15. Lunch will be provided.

At our next department tea, Jack Sneeringer '16 and Martin Liu '16 will talk about research they did at Colgate over the past summer. Lunch will be served following their talk.

Abstract: Large data centers are often looking for ways to improve performance, however it is difficult to estimate how potential upgrades will affect performance. A network simulator should be able to provide an estimate. However, existing network simulators are extremely accurate and unscalable or scalable but wildly inaccurate. Our research was focused on developing an accurate and highly scalable network simulator.

Data is sent over the Internet in small pieces called packets. The best way to visualize this is to think of a table you might order from IKEA. The table isn’t shipped to you in one piece, but instead is shipped in small pieces and is assembled once all of the pieces have arrived. A file is transmitted across a network in the same way. This is an important notion for network simulation because sending a single file across a network is thousands of simulation events.

Our simulator aims to improve scalability through the use of “flowlets.” Flowlets are designed to reduce packet level computation while still realistically simulating traffic. A flowlet is a “super packet” that is handled by the network as a single packet but is the size of 10 or 20 packets. Using flowlets reduces the number of simulation events significantly while still representing traffic flow fairly well. A nice feature of flowlets is that they are completely adjustable. The user can decide how large to make a single flowlet depending on his or her personal preference for accuracy or efficiency.

Our simulator also aims to improve scalability through the use of XCP instead of TCP. The use of XCP was motivated by the difficulty of implementing flowlets in TCP. For instance, TCP requires packet loss to tell the sender to reduce traffic but figuring out how to drop a flowlet is difficult. A nice feature of XCP is that it does not allow for packet loss. In addition, XCP is more scalable from a simulation standpoint than TCP. XCP calculations are done on switches, not at the end user. This means that the number of calculations scales with the number of switches and not the number of end users.

The speaker for our next department tea will be Farah Fouladi '15, who will talk about the internship she did this past summer. Lunch will be available after her talk.

Abstract:By mathematically modeling biological systems we can predict the effect of small changes in the system that are difficult to measure experimentally. This analysis requires multiple simulations of the model for every parameter variation. While this type of analysis is feasible for isolated cells, running many simulations of large systems of cells is extremely time consuming. To decrease the execution time of these model simulations, I have developed a parallelized environment, which utilizes the architecture of a graphics processing unit.

The GPU has many processor cores and the ability for thousands of threads to run concurrently on those cores. For my research, a mathematical model of the human ventricular myocyte (ten Tusscher & Panfilov, Am J Physiol 291: H1088–H1100, 2006) was programmed in CUDA. Taking advantage of the parallel hardware, cell computations along with different simulations of the model are completed on the GPU by many threads running simultaneously. To validate this computational design, cell membrane voltage values were compared with an already existing model implementation in MATLAB. Results showed that the added parallelization has no effect on the computational aspect of the model and that the execution time of the CUDA program decreases by orders of magnitude compared to the previously used MATLAB program.

Using this new computational environment, I analyzed one cause of reentry in cardiac myocytes. Reentry occurs when an electric propagation loops back on itself, abnormally re-exciting cells. There is a short window of time during which a stimulus can excite cardiac tissue and cause a reentry effect due to refractory tissue blocking action potential propagation in only one direction. My program is able to efficiently identify the stimulus-timing interval when reentry occurs in a loop of 1,000 cells.

This parallelized simulation environment minimizes computational execution time and provides a framework for further analysis of more complex and physiologically relevant systems of cells

The Raspberry Pi is a small, low-cost, Linux-based computer introduced in 2012 (see http://http://www.raspberrypi.org), which contains interesting capabilities for software development and prototyping. In the CS department, we are planning to use these computers to drive the (currently dark) screens around the department in order to display announcements, information specific to different rooms, and other content. In this department tea, we'll discuss general capabilities and features of the Pi's, as well as examine a prototype display system. The prototype system is written in Python, and the department is interested in having students involved in further development of the system. All students are encouraged to attend, and lunch will be available after the talk and discussion.

For our department tea on 9/30, our speaker will be from Ernst & Young financial services, NYC and will talk about career opportunities in technology consulting. Lunch will be available after their presentation.

Michael Dermody ("Derm") and Frank Perrelli from BNY Mellon will be the speakers for our department tea on 9/23. They will present on two topics that should be of interest to both beginning and upper-level students. Lunch will be available after their presentation.

Quick highlight of BNY Mellon as a company: company history - who and what we are!

Computing Jobs from A to Z": The Computing field is not just programming anymore. This presentation looks at some of jobs in the field and what they entail. If you are undecided, or if you've ever wondered if you could handle a computing job, this would be a good presentation to attend. We discuss everything from what type of companies you may work for to salaries and interviewing skills.

Michael Dermody, "Derm", a Vice President in the Client Technology Solutions group started working at BNY Mellon 14 years ago in the Syracuse Office. He has worked in many different capacities at the firm including work as a Developer, Team Lead, Project Manager, Intern Program Manager, also in IT Learning and Development, and as a SIRO (Senior Information Risk Officer.) Currently he works in the Application Security group as a Mainframe Analyst.

Frank Perrelli worked for Pershing, LLC, an affiliate of BNY Mellon, for 14 years. For the last six years he has served as the Global Information Security Officer with responsibility for affiliates in the US, UK, India, and Australia. Frank was transferred to BNY Mellon as the Managing Director of the Application Security Center of Excellence, and moved to Central New York to form a new App Sec team. Frank now serves as the BNY Mellon CSIRO.

Join us for our next department tea! Lunch will be available and our speaker will be Lauren Yeary who will talk about her internship experience over the past summer:

"OMG I got an internship in Silicon Valley!! I am the real deal!! I am OFFICIALLY a computer scientist!" This was the thought that ran through my head after I got accepted to be a summer intern at Chegg in Santa Clara. My job at Chegg was my first experience working in the 'real world' with my CS skills so I was curious as to what it would actually be like to work instead of learn. I was surprised to find out that a big part of working as a software engineer was learning! From the super cool offices (and free lunches!) to the incredibly smart, talented and creative people all around me -- my summer at Chegg was far beyond what I could have imagined! Come hear about what I did all summer, what I learned and all about my experience in the valley!

Please join the COSC department faculty for our next department tea, April 22, at 11:20. Our tea will be a friendly and casual discussion over lunch this week, and will also be the last tea of the semester. Take a break and join us for lunch and discussion!

This department tea will be an overview and discussion of the two 400-level courses being offered in the Fall 2014 term. Prof. Hay will talk about the Databases course that he will be teaching, and Prof. Mulry will talk about the Advanced Theory course that he will be teaching. All students are encouraged to attend to learn about these two advanced courses. Lunch will be provided.

Andres will be giving a brief talk reviewing the essentials of digitaladvertising, from the humble banner ad, to paid search, ad networks,retargeting, behavioral tracking, and real-time bidding in demand- andsupply-side platforms. Advertising technology has become a robust marketfor large scale technical innovation and is growing quickly, especially as"big data" promises new critical business insights.

For COSC 480: Software Engineering for the Cloud during the Spring '13 semester, Sean Bjornsson '14, Tom Charron '14, and John Grossmann '14 built a project hub website to centralize computer science projects. Many people at Colgate, or in the Hamilton area, have an idea for a website or an app, but do not have the skills to build it. There are also many computer science students who wish to get involved with projects outside of the classroom in order to gain experience, to build their resume, or even for employment opportunity but do not know where to look. People with good ideas, technical or non technical, can be partnered with computer science students and programmers to implement them.

Sean, Tom, and John are now looking to the department to see if faculty and students would find this tool useful and, if so, what additional features the website would need to be widely used on campus. Any and all feedback will be very appreciated, so please come to the CS lounge, enjoy some lunch, and help critique this website.

How are modern web-based applications put together? What are the functional components and how are they composed to provide a "rich" application experience within a browser window? Join us for our next department tea, in which we will talk about the back-end, the front-end, and everything in between. As usual, lunch will be served.

Welcome back! Please join the COSC department faculty for our next department tea, January 28, at 11:20. Our tea will be a friendly and casual discussion over lunch this week. Come and join us for lunch and discussion.

Please join the COSC department faculty for our next department tea, November 19, at 11:20. Our tea will be a friendly and casual discussion over lunch this week. Take a break and join us for lunch and discussion!

Are global variables really that bad? Although this question has not sparked any real religious wars, it is nevertheless a recurring subject of debate among software developers and CS students. What alternatives exist to globals, and are there situations where their use is appropriate? How do different programming languages handle the issue of global variables? Join us for our weekly department tea where we will discuss these and other critical matters! Lunch will be provided.

This department tea will be an overview and discussion of the two 400-level courses being offered in the Spring 2014 term. Prof. Hay will talk about the Artificial Intelligence course that he will be teaching, and Prof. Sommers will talk about the Computer Networking course that he will be teaching. All students are encouraged to attend to learn about these two advanced courses. Lunch will be provided.

Please join the COSC department faculty for our next department tea, October 22, at 11:20. Our tea will be a friendly and casual discussion over lunch this week. Take a break from studying for your midterms, and join us!

You're invited to an information discussion with department faculty about graduate programs and fellowships. Learn about various opportunities and the application process (including writing a personal statement, asking for letters, etc.), what programs are like and what they expect from you. This tea isn't just for seniors --- learning about these opportunities early in your career can help you decide whether this is an avenue to pursue and can help you better prepare if you're interested. Bring any and all questions, and hope to see you there!

Join us for our next department tea! Our speaker will be Michael Francis, CTO of Recipe into Reality (RiR). RiR is a Hamilton-based startup, with roots in the Thought Into Action program at Colgate.

Lunch will be served.

Title: Startup life from the eyes of a first time CTOSpeaker: Michael Francis

Michael will be giving a brief talk about his experiences working as the CTO of a new startup company. He will cover topics such as how he decided to choose certain languages to use, as well as his experiences managing a team of engineers. Michael is a recent graduate of Humber College in Toronto, Canada. He started coding at 6 years old when he built a functioning computer out of scraps and manipulated the source code to beat his friend at the popular game “Guerillas” -- he's been exploring computer science ever since. He is passionate about implementing new technologies to solve problems in the world.

Complex networks and information seeks to understand mathematically how fundamental approaches to information exchange influence overall network and system performance and behavior. From this understanding we wish to develop strategies to assess and influence the predictability and performance of heterogeneous types of networks and information systems that must provide reliable transfer of data in dynamic and high interference environments. The goal is to develop approaches to describe information content, protocol, policy, structure, and dynamic behavior by mathematically characterizing network and information systems so that we may understand fundamental limits in system behavior, inference in the presence of measured data, and design of secure and fault-tolerant information systems.

Dr. Seversky is a research scientist at the Air Force Research Laboratory, Information Directorate in Rome, NY. He is a principal researcher in the Complex Networks and Information research group at the Information Directorate, leading the development of new techniques in the areas of low-rank modeling, active learning, geometry processing, and computational topology. This talk will highlight his recent work in the areas of geometry processing with uncertainty, active learning methods for human-in-the-loop tasking, and robust online subspace tracking under changing observation dimensionality.

Join us for the first Women in Computer Science meeting this Thursday, September 19th in the Computer Science lounge! Majors and minors, as well as all females interested in working in technology, are encouraged to attend. Women in Computer Science is a new club focused on creating an alumni network of female Colgate graduates working in technology, supplying resources for female Computer Science students to look for funding and internship opportunities, and supporting a mentoring or tutoring system for women in the department.

Join us for our department tea on September 17. Our speaker will be Kevin Kwiat, from the Air Force Research Lab facility in Rome, NY. Food will be served.

Title: Survivability in Cyberspace

Abstract: The seemingly endless breadth of cyberspace coupled with the technologicaldepth of its composition can divide defensive approaches to be eitheroverarching or highly specific. In order to abstract away details for thepurpose of tractability, overarching approaches can suffer becausesimplistic models for threats, vulnerabilities, and exploits tend to yielddefenses that are too optimistic. Approaches that deal with specificthreats, vulnerabilities and exploits may be more credible but can quicklylose their meaningfulness as technology changes. Whether approaches are nearor far term, there are two underlying attributes that remain essential: theability to survive and the ability to fight through.

Join us for a discussion about aspects of summer internships, jobs, and research positions available to undergraduates. Current CS students will talk about their positions, including what they did, what the interview or application process is like, and what they learned and did over the summer.

Please join the COSC department faculty as we welcome new and returning students, and have an informal discussion ranging on topics such as: - Doing research in the department such as honors these or summer research - Faculty research areas of interest - Applying for grad schools or jobs - Fellowships and scholarships - Internships

Ever wonder what a job in the field of computing is like? Join us for our department tea as Josh Zukoff '13, Carson Carlisle '11, and M. Paul Weeks '12 will be back to discuss their experiences on the job at ZocDoc in NYC.

Join us for a presentation and discussion by Prof. David Howard, Math department.As usual, lunch will be available.

In this talk I will briefly describe a research problem I worked on that is located somewhere between mathematics and computer science. The problem involves a mathematical storage scheme.

The set-up:

At the Raider Inn there are n rooms and as this is a very special inn only m specific people in the whole world are allowed to spend the night in the inn. Furthermore as this inn is very popular every night it is completely filled with guests but only one person can stay per room. There are of course 13 managers in this hotel and they each know what the storage scheme for this hotel is (i.e. for any n set from the m people that stays in the hotel one night there is an exact predetermined assignment of rooms depending on the n set). Furthermore, for each member in the special m set of people there exist two special rooms (which are not necessarily uniquely assigned to the members of m) called their query rooms. These query rooms are special in the following way: Suppose a manager does not have the guest list for a particular night at the hotel; however, the manager wants to know if a particular person (call this person Jack) is in the hotel for the given evening. All this manager must do is find out who is staying in Jack's special query rooms and the manager can definitively answer whether Jack is staying in the hotel. (Note: the answer can be yes even if the manager did not see Jack in either query room.)

The question that arises given this set-up: How big can m be in relation to n?

I will briefly say what the going results are and, if time allows, future research directions for this topic.

Would you like to build operating systems that are more secure and reliable than Windows? Perhaps develop smart, secure charging infrastructure for future electric vehicles? Or increase the security of the Android operating system?

Faculty and students in the department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Syracuse University are working on all of these problems, and more. In this talk, I will give an overview of cybersecurity research at SU, and describe two projects in particular. Students considering graduate study in Computer Science or Computer Engineering are particularly encouraged to attend.

Over the last five years, there has been an explosion in the availability and use of mobile devices that are both cellular- and 802.11 WiFi-enabled. Driven by the popularity of applications that run on these hybrid devices, such as iOS- and Android-based smartphones, there is a large and growing demand for network bandwidth by mobile users. Unfortunately, there remains a lack of empirical understanding as to how cellular and WiFi performance compare, and the causes behind observed performance in a range of diverse settings. In this talk, I'll discuss recent work in which we analyzed 3 months of Speedtest data, and what we have discovered so far regarding cellular versus WiFi performance.

If we have some sensitive data (e.g., medical records),can we safely publish it if we exclude identifying information? Theanswer is both yes and no. This discussion aims to shed light onwhether we can really "hide in a crowd."

Title: You can't always get what you want -- an algorithms case studyProf. Vijay Ramachandran

This talk will review tradeoffs in the design of algorithms fornetwork-fault detection based on active probing. In our problemsetting, active probing refers to sending test traffic in a network sothat its performance characteristics can be measured and analyzed tohelp diagnose problematic network components. For example, if testtraffic sent along a path does not arrive at its destination, that maysuggest that an intermediate link or node has failed. While activeprobing can help detect faults quickly, it comes at a cost: the extratest traffic imposes communication and computational load on thenetwork. Thus, we're interested in designing probing techniques thatdetect faults without consuming too many resources. Our workdescribes a framework for designing and analyzing probing algorithmsand unfortunately demonstrates that achieving certain combinations ofdesirable properties is computationally intractable.

This work is inspired by earlier work of Prof. Sommers, and is acollaboration with Prof. Jaggard (visitor at Colgate, 2010-2012),among others.

Over the summer, I studied the impact of using multiple paths for routing in the IP layer. Multiple paths could improve performance by better utilising the resources in the network, but it could also negatively affect performance because of TCP congestion control mechanisms. To test this, we used a network simulator called ns2, which can be programmed using c++ and OTcl. We conducted thousands of trials and then parsed and analyzed the trace files generated by the simulator. We ran through a number of hypotheses and improved the automated systems we used to conduct tests. The simulations we conducted seemed to suggest that TCP performance is much better when routing is done using one path, unless the paths can somehow be constructed to have near-identical delays, which is impractical.

Title: How to be sure that your vote is counted -- even when everyone is trying to cheat

Speaker: Josh Benaloh, Senior Cryptographer, Microsoft Research

Abstract: After you cast a vote in an election, how confident are you that it will be properly counted? Typical election systems require voters to trust the integrity and competence of election workers and equipment vendors. Any break in a long chain of custody can cause votes to be lost and yield unreliable outcomes. But there’s a better way. Verifiable election technologies allow individual voters to check that their votes –- and the votes of all voters –- have been properly counted. This is true even in the presence of dishonest election personnel and malicious equipment – and it isn’t even that hard to do.

For more information about the speaker and his work, see his home page: http://research.microsoft.com/~benaloh/

Join us for a discussion about aspects of summer internships, including:

- What the interview process is like - Examples of different types of positions that our students have held - Differences among companies and teams, such as work environment, expectations, and responsibilities - Other general advice!

Now that we have your attention, please join the COSC department faculty as we have an informal discussion ranging on topics such as:- Doing research in the department such as honors these or summer research- Faculty research areas of interest- Applying for grad schools or jobs- Fellowships and scholarships- Internships

We invite students taking a a COSC course, especially those in 101 and 102, for lunch in the COSC lounge this Saturday from 11:00am to 2:00pm. We encourage anyone that is interested in Computer Science, academically or just for fun, to come and meet other people with similar interests, as well as ask upperclassmen any questions about being a COSC major at Colgate, internship opportunities, jobs, research and anything else you can think about.

We also want people to do some coding over lunch! Yes, coding! The Google CodeJam is starting this Friday at 7pm and ending at Saturday 8pm and anybody can sign up including those in COSC 101 or 102! You can use any programming language, and all you have to do is solve some problems to qualify for the next round. They usually take a couple hours to complete but you can spend as much time as you want until Saturday 8pm. Google’s annual contest is one of the most prestigious contests around and qualifying would be a great experience. (To register for the Google CodeJam click here: http://code.google.com/codejam/ )

In addition to providing lunch there will be snacks for people who want to come and hang out with other COSC majors throughout the day, ask any questions and work on the CodeJam problems!

Abstract: Preventive security is not always appropriate or possible, but it can be complemented by deterrence. Related to deterrence is the idea of "accountability," although this term is often used in ill-defined and conflicting ways. We focus on on accountability as a mechanism for ensuring security in information systems. Towards that end, we present a formal definition of accountability in information systems. Our definition is more general and potentially more widely applicable than the accountability notions that have previously appeared in the security literature. In particular, we treat in a unified manner scenarios in which accountability is enforced automatically and those in which enforcement must be mediated by an authority; similarly, our formalism includes scenarios in which the parties who are held accountable can remain anonymous and those in which they must be identified by the authorities to whom they are accountable. Essential elements of our formalism include event traces and utility functions and the use of these to define punishment and related notions. (Joint work with Joan Feigenbaum [Yale] and Rebecca Wright [DIMACS/Rutgers])

You're invited to an information session / chat with department faculty about graduate programs and fellowships. Learn about various opportunities and the application process (including writing a personal statement, asking for letters, etc.), what programs are like and what they expect from you. This tea isn't just for seniors (although the information should be useful, as the earliest fellowship deadlines are coming up in a month) -- learning about these opportunities early in your career can help you decide whether this is an avenue to pursue and can help you better prepare if you're interested. Bring any and all questions, and hope to see you there!

A department chat to discuss aspects of summer internships, including:

- What the interview process is like- Examples of different types of positions that our students have held- Differences among companies and teams, such as work environment, expectations, and responsibilities- Other general advice!

Josh’s research involved the utilization of Agent Based Modeling (ABM) tools to simulate a quasi-realistic evacuation scenario in a built space. The space took the form of a stadium and the model attempted to take into account psychological aspects like group formation and social comparison to accurately represent crowd behavior. Crowd behavior in built spaces is of interest to a number of types of individual’s i.e. urban planners, emergency personnel. Similarly, agent based modeling can adapt itself to the simulation of a vast array of scenarios. Josh’s model was written to take advantage of flocking behavior to simulate grouping behavior. The model illustrates the ability for ABM to approximate crowd behavior using low level decision making processes and flocking behavior. Additionally, various aspects of communication among people can be shown to have an effect on evacuation time.

Software is available from the Pointers page on the CS department Wiki: http://cs.colgate.edu/cswiki/Pointers

Acknowledgment: This work was done while participating in the Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) program at DIMACS, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, supported by various federal funding agencies including the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Department of Homeland Security.

Note: Students who might be interested in summer research, especially at other institutions, are encouraged to attend to learn about this type of program.

Please join the COSC department faculty as they informally discuss things like:- Doing research in the department such as honors these or summer research- Faculty research areas of interest- Applying for grad schools or jobs- Fellowships and scholarships- Internshipts